It’s time for Residential Life to throw in the towel and admit that its attempts to remake dorm life have failed.
Let’s start with the most glaring error: Small Group Housing. SGH promised many benefits: money for programming, new facilities, big rooms and arguably the best dining center on campus. Even at its peak popularity, though, few students actually elected to live in small groups. Now, only four such groups exist. For the most part, living in SGH was the sentence for the crime of getting a bad lottery number.
ResLife has already tacitly admitted the small group concept has failed by renaming SGH to the Village. But it insisted on keeping the building concept for new dorm construction. This makes no sense.
Apart from the dearth of small groups, people don’t want to live in the Village because it is not conducive toward a social life. True, part of the problem is that it is so remote, but the suite styles themselves are problematic. The lack of suite common rooms lessens intra-suite interaction, for example. And the self-closing doors make it harder to just drop in on friends.
The other big problem is the concept of Residential Colleges. It’s a bust. Students identify with their floor, and sometimes with their dorm, but never with their ResCollege. After eight years, the ResCollege system is little but an administrative demarcation of the South 40.
Once upon a time, ResColleges did matter, as every freshman dorm was paired up with sophomore housing. So it’d be easier to go to Dauten if you lived in Lee, for example. The result was a housing lottery with several rounds, which proved cumbersome and confusing, as well as justified student complaints of the process being unfair. Just like with small groups, ResLife shuffled that failed concept under the rug.
The unfairness lives today in the newer ResColleges, though, with residents of new freshman dorms getting first crack at new sophomore suites. In the interest of fairness, ResLife should either axe this program or offer students in traditional dorms similar perks.
In sum, ResLife needs a new vision. It needs to look hard at students’ preferences. Better than commissioned reports and taskforces, just look at how students vote with their feet. There’s a reason sophomore suites are overwhelmingly sought-after: apart from the one-time freshman floor experience, they’re the most conducive to a sense of community.